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First, there is overwhelming historical evidence that Jesus of Nazareth really existed and did more or less what it says in the Gospels (which the church has often misread, by the way). I have written on this at length elsewhere.
Reading the comments on this website, it’s clear there are some atheists out there who have even more of a mission to unconvert believers than most believers have to convert them!
It all depends what your ‘faith’ is. If you believe that the present world of space, time and matter is basically trash, from which we are supposed to be rescued, then who cares?
The New Testament teaches that the God who made the creation in the first place will remake it, not throw it away.
My faith tradition (ordinary Christianity) doesn't really try to explain the origin of evil either in general or in particular awful situations. Part of believing in a good Creator God, as Christians do, is to believe that evil is essentially absurd, irrational, a denial of the goodness and meaningfulness of creation -- which is of course all the more graphically the case when faced with multiple, random murder.
The question, I'm afraid, is too vague to answer. It's like asking 'is New York a hot city?' -- to which the answer will depend on whether you visit in February or July.
Well, sorry, as a Brit I simply can't answer this one.
But perhaps American readers would like to know that Mormonism certainly hasn't entered the mainstream of British religion and most Brits pretty certainly would only have the sketchiest idea of what it is, where it is, what it believes or does.
People in the UK are far, far less interested in religion as such all round than they are in the U.S.A. Why that should be so is itself a very interesting question but it's not the one you asked!
Jesus was a social revolutionary in the same way that Mozart was brilliant at counterpoint.
That is, it was a key element in a much larger package, but to imagine that it was the main or the only thing is to ignore all the other things that were going on.
Of course, it needs saying because for years the church has screened out that element of 'kingdom of God' teaching, but once the message has been heard -- which I would have thought it has been in many quarters though not all -- it needs to be re-integrated into the larger agenda which Jesus embraced.
About that, of course, I like many others have written quite a lot elsewhere!
The word 'religion' has had a long and varied career. In some traditions it has referred specifically to the human attempts to do things to earn God's favour; in others it has referred to the entire package of proper human response to God's love.
Of course, I presume the question means, 'is the whole phenomenon of religion, any religion, simply a human construct, I.e. Is it the case that there is nothing that corresponds to the word "God"?' obviously my answer is 'no': God is real, God is good, God is love, God is what we see God to be in Jesus the Messiah and Lord.
Same as any other time. Say your prayers, study the scriptures, keep close to Christian fellowship (especially at the Eucharist), hold the whole situation up before the God who groans with the pain of the world (Romans 8) and has promised to wipe away all tears from all eyes (Revelation 21). War sharpens some of the horrible things about the way the world currently is but doesn't change the basic structure of a good world in rebellion and longing for redemption -- with humans caught up in the middle of it all.
There is a peculiar aspect to contemporary war because of broadcasting and so on; people can become voyeurs, captivated by scenes of suffering and devastation while they sit in comfortable homes drinking coffee or beer in front of the TV. Like all voyeurism, this can deaden genuine human reactions and give a quite unhealthy sense of false involvement which then breeds the wrong sort of detachment as its reverse. Enough to find out basically what's going on, pray about it, and get on with your real work and the rest of your life.
The idea that wartime somehow suspended all normal human life was undermined two generations ago by a splendid essay by C. S. Lewis entitled "On Learning in Wartime." It's in one of his volumes of collected essays somewhere.
'Being saved' and 'doing good works' sounds like a low-grade version of the classic Reformation stand-off between Luther and the other reformers on the one hand and the Roman Catholicism of the late mediaeval period on the other -- and, of course, Luther and his followers saw this stand-off as the re-run of the battles Paul had with his opponents, particularly the so-called 'Judaizers' in Galatians
This important set of arguments has become fairly thoroughly confused in the last hundred or two hundred years because it's got muddled up with various others, including (a) the Romantic notion that genuine religion is all about inwardness rather than externals ('How I feel deep down' vs 'What I do outwardly') and (b) the existentialist notion that 'authenticity' consists in being true to what one finds within oneself rather than conforming to outward regulations etc. Unfortunately, these four things (Paul's battles, Luther's battles, Romanticism and existentialism) are simply not the same as one another, though it would take a long article, perhaps a book, to spell all this out (I have tried elsewhere: see e.g. my commentary on Romans in the New Interpreters Bible (Abingdon Press) vol. 10).
(a) Heaven is important but it's not the end of the world: in the mainstream Christian tradition until the Platonists corrupted it, the ultimate destination is THE NEW HEAVENS AND THE NEW EARTH, which will involve an ultimate resurrection (bodily, of course) for God's people (in some versions, for all people).
The way the phrase 'heaven and hell' are used today implies you go straight to one or the other, ignoring the solid biblical testimony to an ultimate new creation in which heaven and earth are brought together in a great act of renewal (for those who want it, check out Ephesians 1.10, Revelation 21 and 22, Romans 8.18-27 and 1 Corinthians 15.20-28 -- though once you see this theme it's there everywhere). When Paul says 'my desire is to depart and be with Christ which is far better', and when Jesus says 'today you will be with me in Paradise', the wider context of both indicates that this will be a TEMPORARY state prior to the eventual resurrection into the new creation. This means (by the way) that the 'second coming' is NOT Jesus 'coming back to take us home', but Jesus coming -- or 'reappearing', as 1 John 3 and Colossians 3 put it -- to heal, judge and rescue this present creation and us with it.
The Pope's reaffirmation is simply another statement of what has always been the RC position -- at least for the last century or more.
(In what follows, I speak, naturally, from the Anglican position.)
On the one hand, there have been striking ecumenical advances -- Pope John's giving of his ring to Archbishop Michael Ramsey being a highlight of deep symbolic import. But these haven't been matched, on the other hand, by any real advance in terms of official recognition of Anglican orders and hence of Anglican Eucharists. There is an inconsistency here in that RCs do recognize Anglican (and indeed Methodist, Baptist etc.) baptisms as valid providing they are trinitarian; so if our baptisms are valid, why not our Eucharists? Is that an Achilles heel in Rome's 'fixed' position?
I have looked at the sites and find myself unable to do more than observe. I have taken part in some Christian-Mulsim dialogues, with great enjoyment and profit, but find myself still very much in the learning stage. It is quite clear that a large number of Muslims in the western world, and indeed a large number elsewhere, are able with clarity and coherence to expound a view of Islam in which it is indeed tolerant, non-compulsory, open to people converting to other faiths, etc. It is equally clear that a large number of Muslims all round the world are able with apparent equal clarity and coherence to expound and propagate other interpretations.
I am not a specialist in the Koran, but I have been present when Muslims have debated with one another the texts which seem to go this way and the texts which seem to go that way. I am not in a position to adjudicate as to which is more central to 'genuine' Islam or indeed whether the Koran genuinely admits of different interpretations. I merely note that such differences do seem to exist, and that large swathes of Muslim-dominated territories seem to live by the more hard-line versions, just as other parts (e.g. Qatar, where I took part in a dialogue for a week in 2003) seem to live by the more open versions.
In other words, No Easy Answers. Sound familiar?
The really interesting thing is, what might the Hindu have meant by 'god'? To whom did this person think (s)he was praying? As long as Americans concentrate on the 'church and state' questions on the one hand or on the 'one nation' issues they will ignore these real questions.
That, I guess, comes from the Deistic background in which it is assumed that 'god' is univocal, whereas precisely in Hinduism that is far from being the case. I have a sense -- which I see in spades on this side of the Atlantic as well! -- of people taking great care not to ask the 'god' question, perhaps in case the cat gets let out of the bag, i.e. that people might start realizing that the Christian claim is that we only really discover who the true God is when we look long and hard at Jesus himself.
The whole 'Jesus Seminar' movement was an exercise in making it harder to do that, making it less likely that people would glimpse the shocking and deeply challenging true Jesus and true God (while, of course, claiming all the while that theirs was the truly radical Jesus and God...).
A genuine conversation about what 'god' means, between a well thought out Christian and a well thought out Hindu, would be a great start. And we might discover that the word 'prayer' actually changed its meaning, too, according to what sort of god you think you're praying to.
This is one of the big ones, of course, and if there was a straightforward or easy answer someone -- Irenaeus, Aquinas, whoever -- would have come up with it. The problem is contained in the assumptions in the question: 'a good God' and the like. We are never, repeat never, in a position where we can size up God and decide what such a being ought really to do. A lot of people today assume, vaguely, that God ought to be running things, stopping earthquakes, preventing road accidents, whatever. They seldom stop to imagine what their own world might be like if God really stepped in every time we were about to do something wrong.
The Bible doesn't pose, or answer, the question that way. It tells a long, complex narrative about a plan launched by the creator God to heal creation. This plan, begun with the call of Abraham, reaches its climax in Jesus and his horrific death, and works out from there, not to the rescue of souls from a doomed world, but to the healing and renewal of the whole creation. That is the framework within which we may be able not indeed to answer the question as posed (which is actually a very post-Enlightenment way of putting it: see Susan Neiman's brilliant book, "Evil in Modern Thought"), but to grapple with the actual world in which evil remains so powerful yet Jesus and his followers declare that the creator God is becoming king.
On all this (sorry for the plug) see my book "Evil and the Justice of God."
What Islam Really Says About Violence, Rights and Other Religions
Gomaa, Fadlallah, Mubarak, Khan, Siddiqi, Ellison, others | On Faith
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